2,550-Year-Old Celtic Beer Recipe Resurrected

Early Celtic rulers of a community in what’s now southwestern Germany
liked to party, staging elaborate feasts in a ceremonial center. The
business side of their revelries was located in a nearby brewery capable
of turning out large quantities of a beer with a dark, smoky, slightly
sour taste, new evidence suggests.

Six
specially constructed ditches previously excavated at
Eberdingen-Hochdorf a 2,550-year-old Celtic settlement, were used to
make high-quality barley malt, a key beer ingredient, says
archaeobotanist Hans-Peter Stika of the University of Hohenheim in
Stuttgart. Thousands of charred barley grains unearthed in the ditches
about a decade ago came from a large malt-making enterprise, Stika
reports in a paper published online January 4 in Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences.